


Suspicions

by orphan_account



Series: Everybody's a Gossip [2]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: M/M, basically nothing happens in this one, i wish they could be bffs more often, oliver and felicity would make cute bffs, plot progression, sequel but not final chapter?, there's like 1 swear word, this is essentially, totally unbeta'd, w/e tho, yoooo i wrote more
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 13:23:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3251270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Diggle does not like Slade Wilson. Slade Wilson doesn't care. People are suspicious. Oliver is mostly oblivious.</p><p>EDIT 25/04/2016: haha wow i was looking this over and there were a lot of little typos and grammatical errors so i've gone and tidied some of them up. also i cleaned what do you know a little as well but not as much</p>
            </blockquote>





	Suspicions

John Diggle did not like Slade Wilson, and Oliver had absolutely no idea why. Slade, for his part, admitted to not knowing either. He claimed he’d never met Diggle before in his life. At no point in his history with the ASIS had he ever crossed paths with Army Special Forces Diggle. He claimed he would know.

He didn’t forget faces, or so he said.

Oliver accepted that. He did not accept Slade’s suggestion that maybe he’d pissed Dig off in a previous incarnation. As far as he was aware, Slade didn’t even believe in reincarnation – not that they ever really had in depth theological discussions so he wouldn’t actually _know_ – and neither did Dig, so that theory was a bust. Whatever the case, Diggle watched Slade with a leery eye while they were down in the Foundry together, and Slade noted in passing that it was odd, then shrugged and went back to practising with the training dummy.

Slade was a bit like that, actually. Water off a duck. Didn’t care if everyone hated him, as long as everyone put it aside got the job done in the end.

Oliver had to admit Slade sometimes rubbed people the wrong way, and he thought it was entirely possible that Diggle didn’t like him because he just grated on people’s nerves sometimes. Slade definitely didn’t go out of his way to be particularly tactful most of the time, after all. Hell, Oliver had almost hated him for far longer than he would ever admit to, back when they’d first met, back on the island.

Still, catching Dig glaring when Slade clapped him on the back after his first sparring session out of the hospital was a bit unnerving. The only other time Oliver had seen Dig wear that exact expression was when they were discussing Floyd Lawton, of all people.

He almost considered asking Dig to take some time off, before he thought better of it.

They had no leads on the Dark Archer. While Oliver recovered from the concussion and broken ribs, Slade went out looking for him, but he’d disappeared, like smoke on the wind.

Physical rehabilitation was about as enjoyable back in Starling City as it had been back on the island. They had painkillers here, of course, but Oliver was loathe to take more than was strictly necessary to enable basic mobility. It wasn’t about being a man and grinning and bearing the pain, or any of that nonsense, though that was what he ended up doing a lot of the time. Rather, he wanted a clear head, and drugs interfered with his ability to think.

Slade made no comment.

Dig told him to take it easy. There was no point killing himself.

He spent time at home with Thea and his mother. Moira didn’t come out of her room much. She seemed like she was in mourning already, and wasn’t that strange? Oliver wasn’t ready to give up on Walter yet. He guessed that she’d already lost one husband, though. Perhaps it was easier not to hold onto hope, than to have it dashed later on.

He and Thea watched movies in the evenings, most evenings, when he wasn’t at the Foundry. And he wasn’t at the Foundry a lot in those first couple of weeks, while his broken ribs were mending and Slade had taken over for him. Thea had seen a lot of what they watched already, and she grumbled about it and spoiled the endings – mostly just to outrage him, Oliver thought – but she didn’t actually seem unhappy to rewatch things with him. In fact, the first Saturday he missed, she sent him five text messages asking where he was.

“You don’t need to worry about me so much,” Oliver told her, later, when she threw her arms around him and hugged him tight, after asking where he’d been.

“I lost you once,” she replied. “And you came back, and I started to take you for granted – and I almost lost you again. I’m not going to do that again, Ollie.”

He hugged her back.

“I’m not going anywhere.” Though he wasn’t really sure about that. He felt a twinge of pain in his ribs, a reminder of how human he was.

Six weeks passed, and suddenly Laurel got in touch with the vigilante.

Firemen were dying.

***

Diggle wasn’t surprised when Oliver brought news back to the Foundry that Laurel wanted his assistance – again. He couldn’t seem to say no to that girl.

He couldn’t seem to say no to Slade, either, and that got under Dig’s skin more than he cared to admit. Especially with everything Moira Queen had told him about what happened to Oliver on the island.

“I have a friend who has a friend in the fire investigations department,” Dig offered, after they decided to look into the deaths of the firemen. “I’ll reach out.”

Oliver inhaled slowly, then said: “If you get any leads, tip the police.”

Damn.

Dig might’ve noticed that Oliver had been back on form for at least a couple of weeks, but he hadn’t mentioned it, mostly out of tact, but Dig figured they should probably be starting to get back to the list. That thing with the Dark Archer had obviously shaken Oliver’s confidence more than he thought, though.

“The police?” he asked, carefully, ignoring Slade who had put down the whetstone and silently approached while they were speaking.

“They just need someone to jumpstart them,” Oliver said, running his hand over the box he kept his bow in absently.

“Well, isn’t the whole idea of being a vigilante is that you do the police’s job?” Diggle asked. It was time they spoke about this. “You know Oliver, you’ve been spending a lot of time around here lately—” Mostly in the mornings and early afternoons, not the usual vigilante hours, but Dig hadn’t said anything about that. “—I thought after six weeks you’d be anxious to hood up again.”

Oliver wasn’t even meeting his gaze, now. He was staring off over Dig’s left shoulder.

“Hell, I even prepared the ‘you got to slow down’ speech.”

No reaction.

There was a bang from upstairs. Oliver twitched.

“Let me see what’s going on upstairs in the club.” And then he was gone.

“Well,” Slade said. “That didn’t really work.”

Dig shot him an irritated glance. “No.”

“What’s that saying? The one about the horses?” Slade asked him, then answered his own question. “Sometimes you have to get back on the horse that threw you. Or the bike. I can’t remember. My nan told me it was a bike, but that might’ve just been because of the I fell off and skinned my knees when I was six and swore I’d never ride again.”

Diggle waited.

“Seems like Oliver needs reminding of that,” Slade said.

And as much as Dig didn’t like Slade, he couldn’t actually disagree.

In the end, it turned out that getting Oliver back on the bike, or the horse, or whatever, was easier said than done, but they got there eventually. There were a couple of near-misses where Oliver got his ass handed to him. He thought he’d lost his edge, and Dig had to give him the closest approximate that Dig could get to a pep talk, and wow wasn’t he giving a lot of pep talks lately.

Diggle was acutely aware of Slade lurking in the shadows, wrapping his hands, when Dig walked into the Foundry to confront Oliver again, because he just never, ever, wasn’t there, and tried to put him out of mind.

“So Laurel’s on her own against a murder who burns people alive?” Diggle asked, because sometimes being blunt was the best option with Oliver when he was being a bit of a blockhead.

“I can’t right every wrong in this city,” Oliver said, and he sounded resigned as he said it.

Diggle approached him. “No, I get that, Oliver. But maybe you’re not back to one hundred percent, like you thought.”

“Maybe I’m not,” Oliver agreed, softly, his tone almost resigned.

Diggle moved first. Oliver saw him coming, and made to counter, to get out of the way, but found himself pressed against the desk.

 _Verdant_ nearly burnt down in the process of getting Oliver back on the horse, before the club even officially opened, everyone suffered some mild smoke inhalation at one point or another – Oliver a couple of times – and Garfield Lynns immolated himself, which was a tragedy that left everyone a little shaken except perhaps Slade.

But they got there, in the end, and in the end, Diggle didn’t think Slade even gave Oliver a clap on the back in camaraderie.

***

Following the fire at _Verdant_ , which was the flimsiest of excuses since it hadn’t even been an attempt on his own life, Oliver hired Slade as a second bodyguard. Dig spent several days looking disgruntled. Slade ignored him, because that was what he did.

Slade rented an apartment in the Glades. It was tiny, but homely, even if there was mildew in the bathroom and floral yellow wallpaper in the bedroom. His landlord was an elderly lady downstairs who had dinner at four o’clock every afternoon, and who needed help taking her garbage out to the curb.

After the island, and the _Amazo_ , and Hong Kong, and the island _again_ , and that mess in Russia, it was surprisingly pleasant to play at domesticity. And running around with Oliver at night stopped him feeling too restless, stopped the itch Slade got under his skin if he sat around and cooled his heels for too long. He wasn’t useless here, and it was good.

***

Malcolm Merlyn was perplexed.

He knew, of course, that Moira Queen would do almost anything to protect her family. She was fiercely protective of her children, and she’d already lost one husband. She would do anything not to lose a second.

There was something wrong with her son Oliver, though, and he didn’t know what it was. He just knew that he’d been dropping thinly veiled threats about Walter and Thea for months to keep her in line, and the most he got was a frustrated look from her and hurried promises that she would sort everything out. Everything would go according to plan, no one would find anything out, she would make sure of it.

The first time he even mentioned Oliver’s name – in passing, no less, all he’d done was ask how he was after he first returned from the island – Moira had nearly bitten his head off.

“You _will not_ touch my son, Malcolm,” she all but snarled at him, her eyes furious, her shoulders tense, her breath coming in shallow gasps with the intensity of her emotion. “You will not harm him again. You hear me? _Never again_.”

He’d rocked back on his heels in surprise, lifting his eyebrows. “All right.”

But that had piqued his curiosity, of course, so he’d been paying attention when Oliver was accused of being the vigilante.

As it turned out, he wasn’t, but by the time Malcolm learned that, he’d already sent someone to despatch him, regardless of Moira’s opinion in the matter. He didn’t need that sort of thorn in his side. Thankfully, Detective Lance had dealt with the issue, and if Malcolm lost an unimportant underling?

You know what they say. If you want something done right, do it yourself. If he’d been serious, he would’ve taken matters into his own hands.

Interesting, though, that Oliver had managed to hold his own against an extremely proficient hit man of Malcolm’s until help could arrive without actually being badly injured himself.

When Moira came to him at his office after that incident, she was pale-faced with rage, and almost incapable of speech.

He asked her if they had an appointment.

“You tried to have my son killed,” she’d managed to bite out, after she composed herself.

“I’m sure you understand,” he said, coolly. “I was justified in suspecting your son of being the vigilante taking out our associates. I had to take steps.”

“Oliver is not your enemy,” Moira told him. _Oliver is no one’s enemy_. She didn’t say it aloud, but it hung there, heavy in the room, and he wondered how she could be so certain. “Now you know that.”

“My apologies.”

She sobbed, once. Malcolm was caught off guard, mostly because Moira Queen was an example of stoicism. She wouldn’t cry, not in front of him. But she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, took a deep, shuddering breath, and composed herself. Then she raised the issue of Josiah’s Hudson’s murder, and wasn’t that clever, an attempt to redirect his attention away from Oliver?

Malcolm still wondered.

He noticed that Oliver was exempt from the functions that she threw, which Thea was required to attend. He mentioned Oliver to Tommy, to see if he knew what was going on, and realised that he had to, from the way he shut down immediately, faster than he normally did, even.

Just before Christmas, Malcolm drew the vigilante out and they fought. As he’d suspected, the vigilante was no match for Malcolm, trained by the League of Assassins, but he did have a few surprises up his sleeves and managed to get away before Malcolm could kill him. He did end up with an arrow in the thigh and two in his back, though.

And Oliver Queen was suddenly in hospital, that very night.

Malcolm Merlyn didn’t believe in coincidences. He broke into the hospital and checked Oliver’s medical records to be sure.

They were – _extensive_.

Pneumothorax. Broken ribs. Laceration on thigh. They could, possibly, be the result of an actual motorcycle accident.

Malcolm went back further, to the shopping list of injuries catalogued when Oliver first returned from the island.

A variety of scars that were probably the result of being stabbed and shot, improperly healed fractures, second degree burns.

Evidence of sexual assault.

Selective muteness. Post-traumatic stress, with a query beside it. Deafness, also with a query, crossed out.

Ah, well. Perhaps it was little wonder that Moira Queen was protective of her son. Far more than Thea or Walter were vulnerable, Oliver Queen was. Malcolm decided to wait and see.

For six weeks the vigilante disappeared, and Malcolm entertained the idea that he’d dragged himself off to die in an alleyway somewhere after their confrontation. It wasn’t likely – someone would’ve found the body by now, the smell would’ve caught someone’s attention after the first couple of days, and if the body of the vigilante had been discovered it would’ve surely been on the news. Still, it was an enjoyable daydream, while it lasted.

Malcolm found himself occupied with a new and entirely unexpected threat. He had, of course, heard distantly of the mercenary known as Deathstroke. There were rumours of former military service, a penchant for ruthlessness, and a distinctive orange and black mask coupled with a sword.

As soon as the vigilante disappeared, Deathstroke seemed to appear to take over his work, purging the streets of Starling City and killing off people Malcolm found useful, and wasn’t that convenient?

He wasn’t idiotic enough to think they were the same person, although he noted – when he watched footage of Deathstroke fighting hand-to-hand down at the docks three weeks after his confrontation with the vigilante – that their fighting style was not dissimilar.

The amount of time that elapsed between the appearance of Deathstroke and Oliver Queen hiring Slade Wilson was enough to throw Malcolm off the scent. He noted during Thea Queen’s birthday with all of its noxiously loud music and glow-in-the-dark jewellery, however, that Wilson hovered closer to Oliver than John Diggle ever had, spent more time murmuring in his ear than was perhaps appropriate, and leered at him more than once in a fashion that bodyguards oughtn’t.

Oliver looked faintly uncomfortable when this occurred, and Malcolm recalled his medical records. If he was unhappy with the arrangement, surely he would simply fire Slade Wilson, though? He was the man’s employer. Unless Wilson held something over Oliver that no one else knew about. Malcolm considered mentioning what was going on to Moira, then thought better. Information was power, under the right circumstances.

It never once occurred to him to look at Slade Wilson as a threat, though in retrospect he should have put two and two together.

***

Tommy had the dubious pleasure of being the first person in Oliver’s immediate circle of friends and family – Diggle excluded – to actually meet Slade face-to-face and speak to the man.

It was late at night, light from the street lamps on the street outside spilling in through the windows, and Tommy was sitting alone in the dark at the bar at _Verdant_ , which had its grand opening soon, panicking. He could’ve gone anywhere, back to his own apartment, out to an actual club to get blind drunk, he could’ve stayed at Laurel’s and started to clear up but the idea of staying amongst her possessions, strewn about like that, had sent anxiety clawing up his throat and he thought he was going to be sick. So he came here.

Everyone else on the building crew had gone home, and Tommy was glad of the solitude, glad no one could see him having a minor breakdown.

Everything was on track for the opening. Their stock was rolling in by the day, he had begun the process of interviewing bartenders and bouncers and valets days ago. He should’ve been celebrating.

He didn’t care. Laurel was missing. He kept thinking about how they had been supposed to interview potential chefs together, and about how she’d blown him off for that _vigilante_ , and he’d been so angry, but now he didn’t care about that either. He just wanted her to be _safe_ , to come home alive and whole and undamaged.

Oliver seemed to appear out of nowhere. One moment, Tommy was alone. The next, Oliver was there with that new bodyguard, who Tommy had only seen from afar before now. Oliver looked haggard, like he’d been awake days running, and Tommy frowned, because that wasn’t right.

“Oliver?” he called out.

Oliver jumped. Honest to God startled, like a deer maybe, before collecting himself.

“H-hey, Tommy,” Oliver said. “I didn’t know you were still here.”

“I came back. I needed to be alone. Laurel—”

“I know.”

“You know?” Tommy asked.

Oliver nodded, absently, while staring at the shelves of liquor over Tommy’s right shoulder. He did that a lot these days – didn’t meet people’s eyes. Tommy didn’t take offense. “Detective Lance called. He said I should know. Since we’re friends.”

There was the faint shadow of a bruise forming on Oliver’s jaw. Tommy wondered who he’d been fighting.

Tommy’s phone buzzed, and he grabbed for it. It was Laurel. She was all right – the vigilante and her father had turned up and saved her from Cyrus Vanch. Thank God. When Tommy hung up, Oliver had disappeared, but the bodyguard was still there, watching him with a curious expression.

“So you’re Merlyn Junior?” he asked, cocking his head to the side like a puzzled dog. “You’re not what I expected.”

Tommy wasn’t used to being addressed like that by the employees. “Sorry?”

The bodyguard shrugged, totally unapologetic, and nodded vaguely towards the back of the club, which Tommy presumed was where Oliver had gone. “Kid tells stories. You feature quite often. You and Laurel. She all right, by the way? That was her you were on the phone to.”

“What?” Tommy said, stupidly, feeling the beginnings of anger bubbling up in his belly.

Oliver reappeared. “ _Slade_ ,” he said, sounding faintly exasperated. “Are you coming?”

Slade winked at Tommy before turning to follow after Oliver.

Tommy left to pick Laurel up from the precinct feeling somewhat unsettled.

***

The vigilante went after Moira Queen.

She shot him.

***

Felicity Smoak had had her suspicions from the Sports Drink In A Syringe Incident. Well, actually, she’d first worked out that Oliver Queen was up to something No Good when he came in with the bullet riddled laptop that he claimed to have spilled a latte on which wasn’t even _his_. But the Sports Drink In A Syringe Incident had turned niggling doubts into actual suspicions, and then the whole thing with the _arrows_?

Well, she should’ve guessed already.

She supposed that there was something about the playboy persona that threw people off. That, and the fact that he’d already been cleared of being the vigilante.

She’d been working overtime in the IT department that night, which was perhaps a good thing. Regardless, it meant that the parking lot was nearly empty of cars when she finally left work, and no one was around. In retrospect, she would decide that this was Definitely A Good Thing. At the time, it was the makings of a mild trauma.

Felicity unlocked her door, climbed into the driver’s seat, pulled the door shut behind her, and had just turned the key in the ignition when she heard the grunt of pain.

Later, she would not admit to screaming just a little bit as she spun around to peer into the back of her car.

The vigilante was lying there, curled up, _bleeding_ , across her back seat.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Felicity,” he said, and there was a hitch in his voice, in his breathing, that suggested that the wound that he was bleeding from was bad.

“How do you know my name?” she asked, because that’s what they always say in the movies and TV shows when mysterious people turn up knowing who you are.

He pulled off his hood, holding his breath, before gasping out: “Because you know my name.”

And beneath that green grease paint, beneath the sheen of pain-sweat, was— “ _Oliver_ – oh. Wow. Everything about you just became so unbelievably clear.”

He stared at her, huffed in something that might’ve been annoyance and might’ve been pain.

“You’re bleeding,” she said, unhelpfully.

“I don’t need to be told that.”

When people were bleeding that much, they typically received medical attention. Felicity turned back to the steering wheel, deciding that it would be too much to explain to the police why her boss’ son had bled out on the back seat of her car while dressed up as the Hood. “You need a hospital.”

“My – my father’s old factory in the Glades,” Oliver bit out.

She didn’t understand, turned back to him. “You need a doctor, not a steel worker,” she said.

“Felicity,” he said. “You have to promise me that you are gonna take me to my father’s factory, and nowhere else.”

The look he was giving her was desperate. She opened her mouth, stuttered once or twice, then managed: “Okay. Promise.” She started her car again and pulled out of her parking spot, muttering: “Something tells me bloodstains are _not_ covered under my lease,” to herself.

The next few hours were a few of the worst of her life.

Being threatened at gunpoint by John Diggle was terrifying, so much so that if he and that other man hadn’t needed her help to save Oliver’s life then she probably would have crawled away to a corner and stuck her head between her knees to freak out.

Playing doctor – not even sexy doctor but like the medical kind with blood and forceps and stitches and dying – when she was squeamish about other people’s blood to begin with was difficult. She had to step away more than once because she thought she was going to hurl.

Fixing a defibrillator while someone was actively coding was possibly the most stressful thing she’d ever been asked to do.

Then there was the waiting to see if Oliver would wake up.

Waiting was actually probably the worst.

She occupied herself by sorting the computers, which were in dire need of work, while she kept an eye on Diggle and the other man – who had been introduced at Slade – out the corner of her eye.

Slade was distracting. He was restless. He paced around down here like a caged animal. Sometimes he would sit somewhere, and just when Felicity thought he’d settled down, he would be up and moving again. Dig sat on one of the desks near the table where they’d laid out Oliver.

Oliver flat-lined again, except he didn’t, it was just an issue with the leads and the heart monitor. Felicity shooed Diggle and Slade away and fixed it.

Hours later, he stirred, blinked blearily and rolled his head to the side to look at the three of them when they approached him.

“I guess I didn’t die. Again. Cool.”

Diggle shook his head and walked off. Felicity followed his lead a moment later, when Oliver turned his head back to stare blankly at the ceiling, but Slade moved to his side and murmured something so softly that Felicity didn’t hear it. Oliver replied just as softly. They weren’t quite whispering, but they weren’t really broadcasting their conversation, either.

Diggle made a scoffing noise, looking somewhat disgruntled.

Felicity only cast him a fleeting glance, before turned her attention back to Oliver and Slade. She wondered if it was rude to stare at them, but Diggle was too, so. She figured it was fine for her to stare if Diggle was doing it also.

Slade hovered close, helped Oliver sit up, brought him water seemingly without being prompted, assisted him with washing off the last of the grease paint around his eyes. Felicity noticed immediately that the two of them were much closer than Oliver and Diggle were, and she wondered how long they’d known each other. It must’ve been an eternity, because Oliver would move, just so, just an inch or so, and Slade interpreted what he wanted straight away.

They probably didn’t even need to speak.

Slade said something that made Oliver smile, just a tiny, pained smile, fleeting as a glimpse of sunlight on a rainy day, but there all the same. A real smile, not like the fake ones Felicity had seen him throwing about before.

Oliver examined the new wound on his shoulder in a little handheld mirror. Felicity had to admit, he had an impressive array of scars already.

“How am I going to explain this one?” Oliver asked.

“Hickey gone wrong?” Diggle suggested, sarcastically.

Slade snorted.

Felicity wondered what the joke was. She wasn’t a fan of inside jokes she wasn’t a part of, so she turned their attention to the more pressing matter of the blood samples taken from Moira’s office.

***

She agreed to join Oliver’s crusade, but just until they found Walter. In the end, though, she found herself becoming fast friends with Oliver and Slade. Slade had a wicked sense of humour that appealed to her, and he thought it was uproariously funny whenever she said something wildly inappropriate. Which was often.

Diggle’s disapproving glares confused her, to start with, before she realised they weren’t directed at _her_.

When she asked him about it, days later, while Slade and Oliver were out terrorising some poor one percenter, all he said to her was: “I don’t trust him.”

She let the matter drop.

***

Things, naturally, came to a head when they learned Floyd Lawton was still alive, back in Starling City, and gunning for Malcolm Merlyn.

***

“Stay back.”

Tommy didn’t know what to do.

His father had been shot, but he was wearing a bullet-proof vest. He’d only been clipped by one of the bullets. But he’d passed out anyway. And then the Hood was there, stepping through the glass, in his Dad’s office, speaking to him, and Tommy was panicking because his father was unconscious and maybe dying, there were men with guns running around downstairs, a sniper on a rooftop somewhere outside, and a madman with a bow and arrows in the room with him and he didn’t want to die too.

The gun in his hands shook.

“I’m not here to hurt you, or your father,” the Hood said.

“I _said_ stay back,” Tommy repeated.

The Hood knelt down slowly and placed his bow on the floor, then reached for something on the ground and lifted it to his face. Tommy thought he might’ve been sniffing whatever it was. “It’s curare,” the Hood murmured, more to himself than to Tommy, who had no idea what curare even was.

“Don’t come any closer,” Tommy said. He wanted to sound threatening, but his voice shook, badly. The Hood had taken down armed gunmen before, and Tommy didn’t even know what he was doing with this stupid handgun.

The Hood started saying something about poison and assassins. Tommy’s head spun. The Hood stood up, stepped closer. Hot rage – or was it fear? – flowed through Tommy’s veins, and he snapped: “I said stay the hell back!”

“In three minutes he’s paralysed,” the Hood said, as if Tommy had never interrupted him. “In four minutes he suffocates. If you don’t let me help you now, he’s dead before anybody gets here!”

And Tommy didn’t know what to do.

“Help. How?” he asked, without lowering the gun.

The Hood raised the option of a blood transfusion. Tommy glanced back at his father, who wasn’t moving. Was he even breathing?

“That’s insane,” Tommy said.

“It’s the only way.” The Hood shook his head. “You’re out of time. You need to make a decision, right now.”

“Why should I trust you?” Tommy yelled.

“Because you always have.” The Hood pulled back his hood, and he was Oliver. And what was Oliver doing here? Oliver was – Oliver was the vigilante? No, that didn’t make _sense_. Oliver couldn’t be the vigilante. That wasn’t right. There had to be some mistake. The vigilante was a ruthless murderer. He’d killed dozens of people and hospitalised dozens more, and Oliver was… Oliver was…

But then Oliver was at his side, helping him pull together the bits and pieces necessary for an emergency blood transfusion, and Tommy realised that he’d dropped the gun.

Oliver had to leave after that, alerted to the presence of the police by the sounds of footsteps in the stairwell, and he left Tommy there, sitting on the floor in amongst the glass in his father’s office with his father’s unconscious body. Tommy brushed the police off and found his way to the hospital in a daze.

When Oliver turned up in the hallway outside his Dad’s room, he wasn’t dressed in green leather, he didn’t have grease paint on his face, and he wasn’t carrying a bow or arrows or anything. He looked just like he always had. As usual, he was being accompanied by Slade, who hung around Oliver like flies around a corpse these days. Whenever Diggle wasn’t there, Slade was, and sometimes he lingered even when Dig was present.

He creeped Tommy out.

And he wouldn’t be with Oliver right now if he wasn’t already in the know. Oliver would’ve sent him away, knowing what this conversation was likely to contain. And didn’t that hurt? Slade, the bodyguard, had been told Oliver’s secret before he, Oliver’s _best friend_ , had.

Oliver wandered up the hall, wearing a guilty expression, like he was _waiting_ to be chewed out. God, that just meant he knew what he’d been doing, and Tommy felt _sick_.

“My Dad’s gonna be okay, thanks to you,” he said, instead of throwing up.

“Thanks to you,” Oliver told him.

Tommy took a deep breath. “I once asked you what happened to you out on that island. You said ‘a lot.’ It doesn’t quite cover it.”

“Tommy—” Oliver started.

“I saw you kill those guys who kidnapped us when you first got back, didn’t I?” Tommy asked.

“What?” Slade said, startling them both. “You and me, kid. We’re going to have to have a long talk at some point in the future. Getting kidnapped is fucking _sloppy_.”

Oliver huffed, a noise of quiet exasperation, and something about what Slade had said caught Tommy’s attention. The familiarity, the word “kid.” _Getting kidnapped is sloppy_. He sounded like he was Oliver’s _mentor_ or something.

But that… would actually make sense. Oliver Queen was the vigilante, but Oliver Queen became the vigilante on a deserted island that wasn’t so deserted after all. He hadn’t taught himself to use that bow, or how to fight hand-to-hand or break a man’s neck, and he certainly hadn’t raped himself.

 _Of course_ Slade knew the truth.

“You were on the island too,” Tommy said, bewildered.

“Yeah, and?” Slade replied.

Tommy turned to Oliver. “Were you ever going to tell me?” he asked.

Oliver froze. Then he shook his head. “No.”

Tommy swallowed. He didn’t say anything else before he walked away.

***

**Author's Note:**

> there's prolly like one more after this and i can just imagine someone (oliver probably) whispering, totally mortified: "there was no lube on the island" and everyone else just sort of dying as they realise their mistake
> 
> except felicity because she'd maybe cackle a little
> 
> but i'll write it later because it's summer and i'm hot and uncomfy right now


End file.
